


aflame

by fillory



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Gen, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 10:03:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19129792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fillory/pseuds/fillory
Summary: In another life, the Desolation gets him first.





	aflame

**Author's Note:**

> I went with the No Archive Warnings Apply tag because this is too short for anything graphic, but it has some canon-typical grossness. Think “MAG 89: Twice as Bright.”

In another life, the Desolation gets him first.

John burns through novels like a forest fire, reading and discarding authors faster than his grandmother can keep up with him—but blazing through their pages in a metaphorical sense isn’t enough after a while, and half a year into sixth form, John’s burning things bigger. Brighter. Whole library wings, left in smoldering cinders. John hops from small town to smaller town leaving ashes and police sirens behind him.

It isn’t always the burning, how the Desolation gets you. Sometimes it’s a lightning strike, a freeway pileup, a riptide. Sometimes it’s knives, sharp in your hands. It’s always fast, though: there are no slow hypothermias or creeping suffocations in the Lightless Flame.

However, it is _convenient_ how quickly a novel can spark to ash. Satisfying. The quick burst of flame is captivating, and even more so is the fact that all of those words, those tedious phrases John has already read and discarded, are gone for good. Or, as gone as you can get with mass-market paperbacks.

John gives into it fully on a Thursday. It’s a laugh, how the Magnus Institute just lets him through the front door. By now he’s burned through three Masters and two PhDs at four different universities; no one ever connected the arson cases to him—he didn’t hurt anyone, not really, only all of the art in their galleries and the books in their libraries and several potentially world-changing lab experiments—but he felt it prudent to move on. The blazing is inside him now, too, his own lightless flame deep in the center of his chest, and the need to cause destruction is ranked just above the need to _keep moving. Don’t look back. There’s nothing for you here, and if there were, you’d destroy it, too._ He hasn’t kept a social connection in years.

The receptionist at the Magnus Institute doesn’t give him a second glance. She should, but perhaps even the Eye has to blink sometimes.

“I’m here to submit my résumé,” John says, and the receptionist—Rosie—barely looks at his qualifications before waving him in for an interview he’ll never make. The stale cigarette smoke that likes to linger around his shoulders hangs in the entryway for a moment before following.

John’s methodical about it. He waited until Prentiss and her Hive had Bouchard and that disaster he calls an Archivist sufficiently distracted before making his plan; now he sweeps through the Institute with his flasks of petrol _drip-dripping_ behind him, unwiring the alarms and fire suppression systems as he goes, helped by his spindled height and quick fingers. The Institute’s data rooms are easier to find than the magnets in his coat pockets are to separate. Piles of uncatalogued floppy disks (floppy disks!) lie waiting to be erased.

The physical records are even easier: filing cabinets quickly upended in a flurry of pages, overcrowded bookshelves doused liberally in petrol. John’s been clicking his lighter as he works, habitually, and whenever a spark catches he lets it fly off into a ready and waiting first edition. The skittering and squelching of Prentiss’ worms recedes down into their tunnels as they sense the profound heat building, building.

_Burning._

This is when John becomes the Desolation.

He’s aware that he comes at destruction sideways. Other acolytes focus on individual terror, on human pain. John tried burning someone alive once. It didn’t take. He stood there, listening to her screams, watching the skin slough down her spine like wax from a candle, and felt… bored. This was a book he’d read before.

In contrast, the first time John managed to kill a Leitner? _Transcendent._

The smell of smoke and burning paper is thick in the air now. The researchers in the Magnus Archives have finally discovered him, but it’s too late for them. Their hands claw uselessly for punctured fire extinguishers. The emergency exits are locked, but the windows are wide open, sucking oxygen from outside into the maw of flame.

John lets himself burn with it: his skin blackens, even darker than it was to begin with, and the soft hair on his arms, chest, and legs stings as the dry, searing heat scorches it away. He laughs, and the smoke in his lungs tastes of glue and vellum and only partially of meat.

Individual pain is an hors d’oeuvre. Delicious, but easily forgotten. The Desolation wants a _feast_. And its main course? Well, nothing in history has hurt the Beholding more than the Library of Alexandria.

The Thing that used to be Jonathan Sims picks his charred and glowing bones out of the ruins of centuries of research and laughs again. It crackles out of him like the stutter he never quite grew out of, like the way leaves sound as a sudden frost slicks the life from their branches.

The Institute will suffice.

**Author's Note:**

> For extra ambiance, try Hozier’s [“Arsonist's Lullabye,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoQvbDROucQ) which I didn’t even realize I was channeling until after I’d posted this 🤷
> 
>   
>  This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).


End file.
